It’s sunny outside. Glaring winter radiance that shoots light but not much heat. I’ve opened the slider doors despite the chilly breeze. Let the outside in; allow that wind to disrupt the stale air accumulated over the past umpteen dreary grey days. A sedimentary mass of cooking smells and human smells and dust and a stillness disturbed by the near constant grumble of the aircon. I’d hoped for sun today. For a photograph to accompany a review of Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die. The destination was a tiny cemetery sandwiched between two suburban houses in the back blocks of Heidelberg. The last grave was 1955 and the earliest some hundred years before. Weathered, those stones. Illegible, some. Cloaked in lichen, huddling together; some leaning, heads bowed. Only about a dozen in all, dotted around this small parcel of land half the size of a house block, too small to build on or a developer would have applied for them to be moved. So here they sit and I position the album cover to make what I hope is an arty shot. Crouching for the best angle it occurs to me I don’t give a thought to the people or lives marked by these stones. They are long gone, and so, probably, are their kin. Such maudlin thoughts have taken residence in my brain these past few months. Several factors are candidates; the death of my friend Steven, the reality of retirement, and the visit last week to our lawyer for an update of our wills. That last was quite powerful, enshrining the boy as executor of our testaments. Because he’s not a boy, he’s eighteen and more thoughtful and responsible than either of his parents were at twice his age. The decision as to how to distribute my estate if neither he nor Cal are alive had been exercising my mind, off and on, since we had these wills first committed to parchment soon after his birth. The Residuary Beneficiaries clause caught us on the hop and I knew I wanted to change what I wrote back then. Now the bulk is to be divided between the Humanist Society and an organisation called Trust For Nature. They buy properties adjoining National Parks and impose a permanent covenant on subsequent owners to keep the land intact. Seems like a good idea, though it’s really a gesture unlikely to produce a dividend for them unless the whole family cash in our chips at the same time. The other change was a tightening up of my instructions for funeral arrangements. It’s pretty clear now. “I direct that my bodily remains (minus any organs still useful to the living) be disposed of in an eco-friendly manner and that any funeral service be non-religious”. To the two most likely to have to deal with it all, I was less definitive. Do what you like. Do what works for you. Somehow I don’t think there will be a gravestone involved.
It’s getting cold so I shut the glass doors and upload the review of Born To Die. The air is still again, but at least it has moved.